This summer I decided to take refuge from the heat in Mount Pelion, a mountainous area in the heart of Greece, halfway between Athens and Thessaloniki. It is home to breathtaking forests and vibrant local communities, where conserving natural resources is a way of life.
But shortly after I arrived, the specter of a major forest fire caused much concern among area residents and their guests. As the climate crisis has increased in recent years, so has Greece’s forest fire season. This year this trend continued. At the end of July, more than 500 forest fires were raging across the country.
Some of them crossed the plains of the Magnesia region, home to Mount Pelion, killing two people, burning more than 5,000 hectares of land and causing immeasurable economic damage. But Mount Pelion itself remained untouched.
Local volunteers, along with forest fire departments, mobilized to extinguish the flames whenever they approached the mountain and threatened the forest.
Pelion is home to farming communities who know the mountain very well and care for it as part of their agricultural activities. They are also quite well organized and have strong ties with the community, meaning the local volunteer fire brigade is well equipped and ready to take action when a fire incident occurs.
I witnessed this communal spirit firsthand one evening in August at the local café in the village of Stagiates on the outskirts of Volos, the capital of Magnesia. Residents launched a fundraising campaign for the local patrol of volunteers who kept an eye on the forest and the coffers quickly filled up. Everyone did their bit and everyone seemed to agree that keeping the forest – and by extension properties and farms – safe is a shared responsibility.
While Mount Pelion survived the flames this summer, another mountainous area, Dadia National Park, in the northeast, near the borders with Turkey and Bulgaria, burned heavily. More than half of the area was completely destroyed by the fire.
The Evros region, where Dadia is located, witnessed Europe’s largest ever wildfire, with more than 94,000 hectares of land and forests going up in flames.
The population of Evros also mobilized, but some were unable to fight the fire. Official claims that some fires were the result of deliberate arson sent local residents scrambling for scapegoats. They bought into the government’s anti-immigrant rhetoric and rumors that asylum seekers crossing from Turkey were burning, and began “hunting” the perpetrators. In one incident, local residents kidnapped thirteen refugees and locked them in a caravan for hours.
What happened to Dadia and Pelion this summer illustrates well how the Greek authorities’ current approach to wildfire management is failing and what they should do instead.
The current state strategy to tackle forest fires, first introduced in 1998, invests heavily in extinguishing fires with fire brigades rather than preventing them through better forest management. Also, local communities are not involved in firefighting efforts, prevention and planning.
The failures of the wildfire management strategy are compounded by decades of state negligence in urban planning and conservation. Lax control over construction has led to settlements becoming death traps during fire emergencies. At the same time, weak protection of forests and other natural habitats has allowed humans to encroach on these areas, putting them at greater risk of fire.
As a result, the country has fared much worse in wildfire devastation than other countries with similar landscapes and climatic conditions. According to the National Observatory of Athens, the country’s leading research institute, Greece ranks first among Mediterranean countries in the area burned by forest fires this year – almost 688,000 hectares (1.7 million acres) ; it also ranks first in the number of hectares affected per forest fire: 19,207 hectares (47,462 acres).
In recent years, the European Union—recognizing the bleak reality of climate change and its effect on wildfires—has begun a union-wide effort to increase wildfire preparedness. For example, at the beginning of the summer of this year, fire brigades from other countries were sent to Greece; when the fires broke out, they were immediately mobilized together with their Greek colleagues.
The Greek government was also able to activate the EU Civil Protection Mechanism to request more help in the first phase of the fires. But even with EU help, Greece was unable to cope with the hell of this forest fire season.
Other EU countries prone to forest fires have realized that simply investing in a fire brigade or waiting for EU aid will not help and have taken action. Portugal is an example of this. Following a devastating fire in 2017, the Portuguese government revised its approach to tackling forest fires.
From setting up an integrated fire brigade with forest experts and conservationists to banning new plantations of the highly flammable eucalyptus tree and coordinating the controlled burning of debris, Portugal introduced a variety of practices aimed at prevention, and it worked. So far, there has been no repeat of the 2017 megafire.
Greece, on the other hand, has chosen not to learn from past tragedies. Following the tragic fire near Athens in 2018, which killed 100 people, world-renowned professor Johann Goldammer, director of the Global Fire Monitoring Center at the Max Planck Institute in Germany, was asked to advise the government on how to improve fire management in the region can be improved. country.
The committee that Goldammer formed released a report that emphasized one principle in particular: prevention. However, his recommendations were never implemented.
It’s time to correct this mistake. Greece should develop a comprehensive approach that prioritizes environmental management and long-term planning for mitigating the climate crisis over short-term economic gains from land development. This requires a paradigm shift in governance that fundamentally reshapes economic development and spatial and urban planning strategies.
This means that the state must re-engage the forestry organization in wildfire management activities, develop a forest inventory and a functioning cadastre. It should work with communities to support and coordinate self-organization and forest fire preparedness, use local knowledge of the terrain and promote activities that help remove flammable materials from land and forests – including targeted grazing and clearing forest debris.
One of the key recommendations of the Goldammer report is to reduce the risk of wildfires by restoring agricultural activities in rural areas to manage biomass. This means supporting rural communities and encouraging the reversal of urbanization as state policy.
In the past, immigrants have helped keep abandoned areas of the countryside alive. Instead of fomenting xenophobia and hatred against these people, perhaps the government could encourage them to play this role again.
The Greek state must also gain firm control over construction. Currently, while various economic sectors are lobbying hard for lax regulations, the law in Greece allows land burned by forest fires to be used for the construction of housing, tourist facilities, wind turbines, etc. In addition to prioritizing business interests over restoration of destroyed forests and habitats, such legal provisions may encourage arson.
All these measures will help not only with forest fires, but also with other natural disasters. Restoring forests, properly managing land, regulating construction and working with local communities can also help mitigate the effects of flooding.
The heavy rains that swept through the arid land in Greece were a good reminder of that. Storm Daniel drowned the country, killing 14 people and paralyzing central Greece – the heart of Greek agriculture.
Shortly afterwards, Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis traveled to Strasbourg to meet European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and ask for financial support. As the impact of the climate crisis intensifies within the EU’s borders, the Union will need to consider setting up a permanent Climate Loss and Damage Fund to help the most affected Member States.
But the EU strategy must go beyond financial instruments. The country will need to rethink its own political and economic strategies and structures to tackle climate challenges. At all costs, growth must make way for sustainable development, conservation and protection of habitats and local communities. Painful changes will have to be made.
And while the political and economic elites of Greece and the EU falter when tough decisions need to be made in the face of climate catastrophe, the residents of Mount Pelion do not. After the floods that followed the fires, they once again did what they did best: organizing.
They worked hard to clear blocked roads, helped clean up after the flood, rescued a group of refugee children from a flooding river and regularly supplied the city of Volos with clean water from the mountain.
The people of Mount Pelion do not suffer from any doubt. They know that putting the conservation and well-being of the community and nature above narrow selfish self-interest is the right thing to do.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Al Jazeera.